


you are not alone in this

by moonbeatblues



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, M/M, hdm makes the best aus, if i continue it will ofc be bashter, some minor shadowgast
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-25
Updated: 2019-11-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:53:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21558895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonbeatblues/pseuds/moonbeatblues
Summary: With Jester still fawning over the card and Caleb left clutching the carnival flyer, he’s the first to figure it out.He flips it over, leans back from the table and squeezes Nott’s hand.“They don’t have dæmons. None of them do.”(a golden compass au)
Relationships: Beauregard Lionett/Yasha, Caduceus Clay & Fjord & Jester Lavorre & Beauregard Lionett & Nott & Caleb Widogast & Yasha, Caduceus Clay/Fjord, Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett, Mollymauk Tealeaf/Caleb Widogast
Comments: 4
Kudos: 87





	you are not alone in this

**Author's Note:**

> in which no one has a traditional dæmon, and everyone has trauma

“You know, I have never been this far south before,” Caleb says, and hoists Nott higher on his back. It’s a post usually reserved for Frumpkin, but he’s a mouse, balled up in a breast pocket at the moment.

Even nestled east of the smallest foothills, Trostenwald still looks absolutely swallowed by mountains, shade. 

Engulfed from a distance, just like them.

It’s cold here, the late fall full-on heeling them, and Nott presses her cheek against Caleb’s ear. 

“Can I borrow him?” She rasps, trying not to sound hollow; Caleb hums amicably and snaps. 

When Nott asks for Frumpkin, he always comes to her as a sparrow, just like she’d told him. The feathers feel just the same, but he can never quite get the pattern right— it makes her sad to look, so she just holds him against her face in both hands and tries to breathe.

—

It’s actually not the coin Nott notices first— she hates the ears like nobody’s business, but they’d pick up that strong a Western curl a mile off. 

Sparrow-Frumpkin is still perched on her shoulder and Caleb’s pretending to be half-asleep like usual, looking through Frumpkin, so she know he hears it perfectly well when she hisses to him. 

“What’s a tiefling doing down here?” She wonders if Caleb ever thinks her hypocritical for wondering such things, or just suspicious. Either way, he never lets on.

Continuing to stroke Frumpkin’s head, they both clock the accent, the flouncing. The skirts.

There’s always such a traitorous, hopeful spark in her gut when she can’t see someone’s dæmon on first glance. As though everyone else should have slow, drooly dogs.

(Well, these days even more, it’s starting to feel that way.)

—

With Jester still fawning over the card and Caleb left clutching the carnival flyer, he’s the first to figure it out.

He flips it over, leans back from the table and squeezes Nott’s hand. 

“They don’t have dæmons. None of them do.”

—

“She’s sensitive about it, you idiot. Wouldn’t you be?”

“Nott isn’t,” Beau says grumpily. “ You aren’t.”

“Yeah, well, we’re different.” Molly looks at her hard, like the soft red of his eyes sets for a moment, before standing up. “Just drop it, okay?”

He goes running to catch up and Beau watches Molly pretend to trip, leaning hard against Yasha’s arm so she turns and grins down at him, full of teeth and open in a way Beau can’t imagine. Molly keeps leaning on her as they walk until Yasha’s almost carrying him, and they look for all the world like such a pair. So joined at the hip that Beau reaches unconsciously for Dairon, who noses into her hand. 

“I see,” she says. “We should keep an eye on them.”

—

Cree is beautiful, huge and glossy-black and lithe, and Molly won’t touch her.

In the dim campfire light, he cups his hands like Gustav taught him to and closes his eyes, imagining them. The weight, still light. The not-yet elegant curve of the neck, the spray of feathers at the back of the head.

He can tell when they step into his hands, when the weight shifts from hazy headspace to solid, real. A little more scratchy than soft. Warm.

Caleb opens one eye from across the fire, nudged awake by cat-Frumpkin, and he sees, before Molly ever gets to, the snow-white peachick with dewy red eyes, cradled in his hands. 

—

Caduceus Clay is a strange one, tall and unexpectedly pink. He talks slow, almost sleepily, and he seems perpetually startled by the big, jewel-green beetle clinging to his staff.

“She’s a bit of a new development,” he says, a little sheepish, to Fjord on watch one night. “My sister had her for the longest time, and then.” His eyes get distant, confused. Morose.

“Well, I guess that’s what I’m hoping to find out.”

—

“Have you decided yet, little one?” The Traveller looks like Sprinkle again, curling around her wrist and climbing up to scare the real Sprinkle back into Jester’s hood, and she shakes her head.

“I’m scared,” she whispers when he returns to her cupped hands. “How am I supposed to decide? Can’t you just keep changing like Frumpkin?”

“I can,” he says, and is a basilisk. “But if I do, I have to leave.” 

It’s his favorite form, Jester thinks, brilliant green, frilled, whip-fast. He darts from the shell of her hands across the floor.

“You’ll know,” he says, in her head, and she knows he’s gone again, “when you know what you need, not what you want.”

Sprinkle peeks out of her hood, tickling whiskers on the back of her neck, and she hunches over her empty hands and thinks about home. 

—

“Teach me how to make the link,” Caleb says, courage a brief flare of fire in his ribs, “I know you can.”

The Shadowhand tilts his head, amused. “Show me something.”

Caleb snaps and Frumpkin disappears. He curls his hand loosely into claws and punches upward, and the shimmery cat’s paw does the same.

Essek smiles. The deer-like dog at his side scatters on the breeze when he opens his fist, like a dandelion. 

“Are you busy right now?”

—

“Do you still miss her? Your first dæmon, I mean.”

Beau shrugs. “Not her, really. I miss the feeling, though, I guess. When I’d pet her or she’d turn into something big and warm and it was like— like I was never really alone, y’know?

“And I’m glad I have Dairon, and she cares about me, but she’s not mine. She never really will be.”

“Yeah.” Jester’s voice cracks, and she sidles a little closer in their shoved-together beds. “You’re not alone, though, Beau. Not ever again.” 

Jester’s hand slips into hers, pleasantly cool, soft but squeezing fiercely. “And when the Traveller stays, we can share. I wouldn’t mind, if it’s with you.”

Beau blinks sudden tears onto her cheeks. Thinks about the honey-sweet warmth that would curl in her belly, her fingertips when Tori would let her kestrel step from her own hand onto Beau’s, when she’d stroke the silky feathers under its head and feel full of embers.

“Okay.”

—

Caduceus sits with him that morning while they watch Vandren cry with joy and swoop circles over the lake, his feathers catching the bleary sunlight curiously. Like scales.

“It’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it? When they fly.”

He’s kept the Lady in his staff while they’ve been this far north, but she crawls out now, dazzling and strange, and takes flight for a moment before landing on the flat of Fjord’s sword, right on the now-invisible seam.

It burns for a moment, like coming inside from the cold, and then blooms in his chest. It feels like breathing easier, it feels like dreams of floating on the sea, it feels like home.

—

Yasha looks up from her hands when they rest in the room just beyond the cathedral, paint bleeding dark trails with her tears.

“He told me her name,” she whispers. She wipes her hands on her furs and touches them, huge and glowing, to Beau’s shoulders. “I’m so sorry.”

They sit against the stone wall and breathe for a minute.

“Do you remember what she is?” Beau asks, hoarse. Her stomach is still smeared a little with blood. 

“A bird,” Yasha says, sorrow and shame all maelstromed together with a broken sort of awe. “A giant bird, with broken wings.”

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi @seafleece on tumblr! i chose not to explain the dæmons fully in case i expand on this, but i can answer questions about them


End file.
